Time to ride the train again w/ some questions

[Lennie]

Well I will be riding the Silver Star roundtrip WAS-MIA and ORL-WAS in March and I'm just wondering if it will be any different than the Meteor, except for the longer trip time?

 

[George Harris]

What do you mean by different?

There is some difference in routing. The Silver Meteor follows the former Atlantic Coast Line main all the way from Richmond to Orlando to Auburndale, then the former Seaboard Air Line main from there to Miami. The Silver Star diverges from this route at Selma NC, takes the NS ex-Southern line to Raleigh, then the former SAL line from there to Savannah GA where it rejoins the ACL line. The Star also goes past Auburndale on the ACL on into Tampa and then turns around and goes back out to Auburndale and then down to Miami. Generally you will hear these lines referred to as the "A Line" and "S Line" as that is the way they are designated by CSX.

Most of the A Line is nominally 79 mph territory. The NS section is 59 mph and the S Line is I understand to be 60 mph north of Columbia SC and 79 mph south thereof, but I could be wrong on these. There are many more freight trains on the A Line.

Other differences I will leave to others.

 

[mrdisnie]

I just traveled on the 91 and 98 about two weeks ago, there seems to be no major changes except for OTP. When we traveled last March we arrived in ORL about 1 1/2 hours late this time we were about a half an hour late but we ran on time for most of the trip.

As for the trip home on the 98 it was the first time in many trips that the ttrain was on time into ORL and maintained it all the way up to NYC. I was aazed, we were actually 15 minutes early into JAX and about 5 Minute late into WAS. We finally pulled into NYC 10 minutes early, great trip!!

There were no major on board service changes that i noticed, Cafe car was still operating as it has in the past and the sleepers seemed to be about normal, maybe not as clean as before but nothing to write home about. Crew members were very attentive.

As for speed of the train, i agree with a past post i brought a portable GPS which i set up on my laptop and for most of the trip we seemed to be hitting 80 to 81 mph.

All in all i would expect about the same as you had in the past except for OTP it seems to be getting better!!!

 

[battalion51]

With Silver Service running on two engines now it make it much easier to get up to speed. There is a very noticeable difference in acceleration with two engines online vs. a single engine. CSX has said they will run the trains on time if there are two engines, and for the most part they have kept their word.